The Grand Palais offers you to take the train of the Russian Revolution with its artists full of fire and crazy ideas, fervor and formal invention, these pioneers of modern art that sits today in all major museums in the East as in the West. Forty years after the “Paris-Moscow”, the exposure reference of the Centre Pompidou, “this is Red. Art and utopia in the land of Soviets”, which invites you in this empire of the East became the breeding ground of a new world. In 1917, the victory of the Bolsheviks gives artists isolated the opportunity to speak on behalf of all, to shape an ideal in spite of constraints, to body with a whole country. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin is in the game and the debates of modernity are closed. Their fates, often tragic, embracing the history of the USSR. It was the dream of revolutionary, the star of progress, a world of perfection inhuman, freed from all constraints, family and couple including. It leads to the straightjacket of stalinist whose taste is the most conventional.

Here is Kazimir Malevich, author of”black Square”, the most radical of the Russian avant-garde.

Here is Kazimir Malevich, the son of a foreman of Kiev in a plant for the refining of industrial sugar (beet) and the author of the black Square (1915), the implementation of the most radical of the Russian avant-garde. With the revolution of 1917, self-taught is elected as deputy to the supreme Soviet in Moscow. In 1929, the soviet power the vilification for his “subjectivism” and as “dreamer’s philosophical,” . Despite his return to the figurative ( The white Horse , 1930-1931), it will be successively arrested in 1930, accused of espionage in favour of Germany, and then shelved. He died at age 57 of cancer, in 1935, in Leningrad, and will be buried at a funeral official, near Moscow, in a coffin supremacist. His students file a cube supporting a black square on his tomb (now gone).

Here is Alexander Deïneka, painter and graphic artist, leader of the first generation of artists in post-revolutionary ( On the construction site of the new workshops , 1926, oil monumental inspired by the photomontage, the icon of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). Her creative journey started during the civil war. It adorns the streets of his hometown of Kursk, painted trains is the prop, becomes in 1928, one of the founders of the group in October, received in 1937, the gold medal at the international Exhibition of Paris for People illustrious of the land of the Soviets . Repeatedly accused of “formalism”, the hero of socialist labor (1969), produced large paintings that remain on the crest disorder between the forbidden and the obligatory: the young bathers naked enough homophilic Donbass, the lunch break , 1935, the improbable and mawkish V. I. Lenin on walk with children , 1938, and, in spite of the code stalinist puritan, The Bather , 1951, giant naked worthy of the sensual Maillol.

Under the baton of the commissioner Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, the two floors of the Grand Palace and play of light and shadow to illustrate the time of dreams, then their punishment without appeal.

“Red – Art and utopia in the land of the Soviets,” the Great Palace. 3, avenue du General-Eisenhower (Viii). Tel.: 01 44 13 17 17. Opening hours: from game. to the lun. from 10 h to 20 h, sea. from 10 h to 22 h. Closed on mar. until the 1st of July. Catalogue: “Red. Art and utopia in the land of the Soviets”, under the supervision of Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov (Nmr, 45 €). Red! Art in the land of the Soviets , a documentary by Pierre-Henri Gibert and Adrien Minart (Arte, 2019, 52 min., 14,90€).